LaVar Ball has been making headlines with his mouth for the better part of a decade now. The father of three professional basketball players – Lonzo, LiAngelo, and LaMelo – has been outspoken about himself and just about everything under the sun. That includes Michael Jordan.
Ball first called out MJ in 2017, saying “Back in my heyday, I would kill Michael Jordan one-on-one,” and he hasn’t backed down since.
Ball was a guest on the Audacy Original Podcast “Stacey King’s Gimme the Hot Sauce” and once again proclaimed that he could take down the greatest basketball player of all time.
“Here’s the thing: 1-on-1, my competitive skill to win is too strong, and he was too light in the tail to mess with me. 1-on-1, there’s nothing he could do. I’m too fast and too strong,” Ball said (59:23 in player above). “I bag him in, even if he tries to stop me, I lift him off his feet and I just give him a jump hook with the right or the left, or give him a nice little bank shot step through. Easy money. He’s 210 pounds. I’m 270.”
While Jordan may have been 210 pounds in his playing days, he’s been enjoying retirement a bit over the last two decades. That’s another reason for Ball’s confidence.
“Mike can’t do nothing with me right now,” he said. “Mike is 50-something years old. I’m 55 and I drink milk all day and eat steaks. He’s smoking cigars and drinking cognac. How you gonna run through me?”
Ball has never lost in a one-on-one game, he claims, not even in elementary school.
“Never lost. Ain’t got to worry about it. Always the strongest and the fastest,” he said. “You look at Mike’s name and be like ‘Oh, that’s Michael Jordan!’ He couldn’t do nothing with me.”
Jordan was 14-time All-Star, 10-time scoring champ, and six-time NBA champion, and he is in the Basketball Hall of Fame. That’s a lot of accolades, but mind you, Ball averaged 2.2 points in 26 games for Washington State in the 1987-88 season. A 1-on-1 game might finally settle who the better basketball player is.
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